Colbert Bump – Firefox 3 Proves its Existence

Many of us at Mozilla and within the Mozilla community were excited when Stephen Colbert gave Firefox 3 his “Colbert Bump” on the day of Firefox 3’s launch (a big thanks to Jonathan Zittrain). You can watch the video here.

Download Day was a wild success, and we were happy to share some thanks and credit with Stephen. However, a few questions naturally arose, e.g., what was the direct impact of the Colbert Bump? and could the effect be precisely measured?

Here’s what we did: we looked at downloads of Firefox 3 by users within the U.S. – and then we drilled down to a minute-by-minute view to see what, if anything, could be detected. At minute 23 of the broadcast, Colbert said, “Firefox 3 just got the Colbert Bump.” What happened next?

We saw a big spike in downloads exactly one and two minutes later:

Apparently we’re not the first to find scientific evidence proving the Bump’s effect. If you’re interested in that previous study by James Fowler of the University of California at San Diego, you can read the complete version here.

The graph seems to show 500 users per minute for two minutes, plus let’s say 500 users for the reruns. That’s 1500 users. I wonder how many were already planning on downloading Firefox3, and how many were convinced by Colbert? At any rate, the fact that the bump’s so clearly visible is really cool!

Then Would you say that the dip of about the same duration and magnitude came at the beginning of his show happened because people were tuning into it? Come on stop reading to much into things and start fixing firefox. FF3.0 has had over a million crashes in the last three weeks. I’ve stopped using it.

Vylum: It’s obvious, isn’t it? The lows were when everybody stopped downloading Firefox to watch Colbert. Then when he mentioned Firefox they remembered what they were supposed to be doing and continued downloading two copies at a time to catch up!